House of Cabal Volume One: Eden Read online

  HOUSE OF CABAL

  Volume One:

  EDEN

  Written by

  Wesley McCraw

  Copyright 2016 Wesley McCraw

  Thank you for purchasing, The House of Cabal Volume One.

  For a free Lovecraft inspired short story, “The Ovum Horror,” and news concerning future releases, sign up for Wesley McCraw’s mailing list HERE.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. No matter how this ebook was obtained, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage others to download their own copy. Thank you for your support.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  About the Author

  The Forgiving Preview

  Chapter 1

  I

  Angels entered the timestream and bore witness on Earth. They traced crisscrossing destiny threads, of lovers or of enemies, along a preordained pattern originating at the Big Bang and ending at the Apocalypse. The angels dressed in performance accoutrements and interpreted what they had seen by way of operas on the holy stage in the Parthenon of the Art. They glorified a single artist or martyr. Or the angels worked together in temporary, operatic, task forces to stage a million melodramas at once, exploring themes such as love, greed, or nihilism. The operas exalted God and His creation. He offered unconditional love in return.

  While my brothers and sisters performed in Heaven, I bided my time in a banjo tree just inside the gates of Eden’s Garden, where the rules of time and space weren’t so strict and I could live as an ascetic. The other witness angels hid their disapproval. I knew they thought less of me. For never performing. For my stage fright. For being the odd witness out.

  Sometimes I chatted with Uriel, who always stood guard at the garden gate as if a human invasion was eminent. Guard duty was pointless. Not only were Adam and Eve never coming back, they had been wiped from existence. The entire cherubim army had no enemy to fight and spent their time reveling in the barracks, partying away eternity like some kind of divine college fraternity.

  Mostly, I kept to myself.

  Inspiration for my singular opera would come along. Until then I waited.

  The other witness angels witnessed, composed, performed, and repeated. They thought their art was worthy. Allah literally saw everything coming from the beginning of time.

  When I was feeling particularly masochistic, I spied on their performances and felt the embarrassment they should have felt for themselves. It didn’t matter if they depicted war or peace, one moment or a million years. No matter how extraordinary, no matter how obscure, their stories were never going to spark revelation in the Almighty, not when they selected their plots from a grand design Elohim had created Himself.

  If I didn’t settle, if I was patient enough, I would discover a true secret. Something only I had seen. Their pity over my inaction would burn away in the flames of my glory. They would lay prostrate at my feet.

  But only if I kept my faith. There was something even God didn’t know. I would find it by letting it come to me. I was Siddhārtha under the Bodhi tree. I was Sir Isaac Newton. The lotus would bloom, the forbidden fruit would fall on my head, and I would be inspired. So I waited.

  II

  A high-pitched scream disrupted my stupor.

  From my perch in the banjo tree I saw Dana Parr, a middle-aged blond woman, terrified, screaming her head off. A python-sized millipede had coiled around her legs. It sliced through her pants with its mandibles and feasted on the rinded cotton.

  Near a cherubim-shaped void where Uriel usually stood, Dana’s husband sat, horror-stricken and mute in a motorized wheelchair. Hundreds of beetles swarmed, drawn to the foreign material. The beetles dissolved the chair’s tires, consumed the unused tread of the man’s boots, ate the leather, the laces, the metal grommets, and then his socks. He had no reaction. The beetles swarmed his bare feet; ate away dead skin, microbes, and dirt; and started in on the cuffs of his pant legs.

  I leapt from my branch. My robes flared. Dana, seeing my massive form land in the bug-infested grass, lost her color and continued screaming. Tears streamed down her pallid cheeks.

  The endless conflicts of humanity had hardened me to human suffering, yet her shrill cries pierced my indifference. To appear smaller and less threatening, I folded inward and kept my distance. It never occurred to me before that if humans were to return to paradise, they would see it as hell and me as some kind of demon.

  When Adam and Eve existed, this was their home. We played together without worry in a peaceful ecosystem. All arthropods were safe here.

  Above Dana, insects thickened the sky like storm clouds. In the distance, sentient foliage moved across the landscape like advancing armies. Her horror was primal, seated in an evolutionary memory that would be difficult to nullify.

  Poor woman, exquisite in her naked suffering. The Garden of Eden was nothing like she imagined.

  Life and death and time and space were mercurial here. That ambiguity, if introduced to Earth’s rigid reality, could fracture existence. A second Big Bang could not only restart the universe, it could make it so the timeline that led her here had never existed.

  Dana Parr couldn’t leave, whether she thought this place a nightmare or not.

  The millipede stiffened, smelled her screaming mouth with its antennae, and took the opportunity to clean fig remnants from Dana’s otherwise flawless teeth. In that moment, I decided to witness for myself the events that led to her unexpected arrival, thus bringing my hermitage to an end.

  III

  The Iraqi army disbanded in 2003, leaving thousands of men and their families without income and Baghdad unprotected. Dana Parr and her husband took advantage of the ensuing chaos and paid a museum guard to smuggle out a five-thousand-year-old cuneiform tablet from one of the Iraqi National Museum’s underground storage rooms.

  The tablet was traded off, and a local expert helped decipher the uniquely primitive Sumerian symbols. The symbols referred to vague landmarks that led to a remote valley among the rolling dunes, the supposed birthplace of humanity. The Parrs led an expedition into the Iraqi desert and followed the landmarks. On the third day, at hopefully the correct destination, guides set up camp. A security detail of independent contractors from Blackwater Worldwide scouted the perimeter. It was all sand and more sand. Scientists from Eastern Europe took samples and unpacked lab equipment. The couple wasn’t sure what to look for, only that this was the place to look.

  Before sunrise the day after establishing camp, Boris Kachka, a lanky Russian-born scientist, went outside the Bedouin tents to take a piss. Drowsiness made him sway. Back in Tbilisi, Georgia, his wife was due to give birth and wouldn’t leave his mind no matter how much he tossed and turned on his cot next to the other sleeping scientists. There was no way to contact her to make sure she was okay. The satellite phone was to be used for emergencies only.

  The full moon hung huge on the horizon and illuminated specks in the sand fleeing from his urine. He squinted and blinked his itchy eyes. What were they? His forearms and the back of his neck prickled in repugnance.

  The tiny, black, fleeing things had tentacles.

  He pulled up his shorts. No matter how much the thin
gs frightened him, he didn’t want them to escape. He got down, ran his palm along the slope of the sand, and caught a few between his slender fingers.

  Despite his first impression, there was only one, and it squirmed like a maggot. Careful not to crush it, he held it close to his face. By the moonlight it resembled a tiny obsidian sun, like a bit of darkness come alive in the desert night.

  He studied the creature under a microscope inside the mobile laboratory at the south edge of camp and tried to remain calm. Its body was that of a mite, but not its legs. Tentacles, or energy tendrils, reached out in all directions like black solar flares. They behaved simultaneously like particles and waves.

  This absurd desert creature could be his life's work!

  He brewed coffee to give himself time to breathe, went back in with a level head, and continued studying the tendrils through the microscope. As he did so, something squirmed between his thumb and index finger.

  He shook out his hand. The squirming didn’t go away. The sensation was inside his finger, like his index finger’s distal bone had grown restless and wanted free.

  He reached without looking for his coffee and took a sip. The warm ceramic felt comforting in his hand, and the smooth yet acidic liquid was the perfect temperature: just under scalding.

  He looked and saw that his cup was still on the other side of the laboratory. His hand was empty.

  Confused, he assumed he must have just forgotten that he’d set it down. He counted his steps as he crossed the rectangular trailer. It took twelve steps to reach his cup. It was an impossible distance to not notice. He took another sip to test the coffee’s current temperature so as to approximate the passage of time. If he had lost himself in thought, it should have been colder, but the temperature seemed the same as his first sip: just under scalding. If anything, it was even hotter.

  Something strange was happening to reality, or at least to his perception of reality.

  He exited the lab in haste. The sun had peeked over the horizon. His bosses, the Parrs, would be displeased if he waited any longer to inform them of his discovery. He also needed to wake his colleagues. Going it alone was a selfish and unwise misstep. Science functioned best when collaborative. He rubbed the goose bumps on his arms as he walked. Besides, he would feel better if other people were around.

  He passed the tan canvas Blackwater tent, which comfortably housed twelve men and was the camp’s biggest. The officers inside already stirred. Most were hotheads he tried to avoid. Now their bravado gave him comfort. He heard one of them laughing and felt ridiculous for having been so spooked before.

  He came upon the tent again.

  Somehow he must have gotten turned around.

  The logo on the side of the tent was impossible to miss. A red oval surrounded a bear’s paw print with “Blackwater” in bold. A laugh came from inside the tent again. Boris strode forward, trying to shake his déjà vu.

  And there it was again, the Blackwater tent, the red oval, the paw print, and the distinct, muffled laugh. For the first time, he realized the red oval was a crosshairs.

  Maybe sleep deprivation was causing his déjà vu. That was more plausible than a tiny bug distorting spacetime.

  Only when he spoke to the Parrs did he call his discovery an Eden mite. He had to call it something.

  “The Eden mite has a different elemental profile.”

  “Dr. Kachka, what does that mean?”

  “It means…” Boris spoke English very well but was flustered. “I don’t know what it means. As a scientist, I’ve never seen anything like it. It will take time.”

  Dana’s husband, an ex-oilman, knew a valuable discovery when he heard one. “We found something!” He slapped his arm rests. “We’ve really found something!”

  “We found a mite.”

  “An Eden mite!”

  Dana’s skepticism was understandable, but Boris knew the mite was only the beginning. “Where there is smoke, there is fire, as you say.”

  Dana ordered everyone in camp to scour the dunes.

  The guides helped move the tents. They argued that an Arabian summer shouldn't be treated with such arrogance, repeatedly pointing at the rising sun. They refused further orders and stubbornly rested in the shade.

  As the sun arced across the sky, temperatures soared into the triple digits. Dana was thankful that at least the Blackwater employees were professional enough to follow orders. They drank bottled water, draped wet undershirts over their heads, pissed, and drank more water. Most were ex-military and accustomed to the harsh desert environment. Despite their precautions, officer Joey, while excavating with a shovel, dropped from heat exhaustion as if suddenly dead.

  The officer next to him rolled his eyes.

  "Well, help me get him up."

  Dana feared that she had been the stubborn one, not the guides, for making everyone work through the heat.

  “Don’t worry your pretty little head, Dana. He’ll be fine. Joey’s a big boy.”

  Joey was a barrel-chested gentle giant and was always the first to get motion sickness or food poisoning or stung by a scorpion.

  Four officers worked together to carry him into the Parrs’ tent, all the while recounting how Joey once fainted while waiting his turn in a brothel and how it sucked that there weren’t brothels in the Middle East.

  Dana's husband gave the fragile ex-marine liquids and dabbed him with a wet cloth. “Look at this hulk!” he said to Dana. “He’s like Paul Bunyan. And handsome too.” Joey stirred, disoriented. “You okay? You went away for a little while.”

  Joey was back on his feet in less than an hour and out under the sun again, searching quadrants.

  "At least we’re not getting shot at,” Joey said, still embarrassed. “Knock on wood." He wiped his forehead, raking salt grit across his skin.

  “If you feel faint, go sit down. We can handle this.”

  “And let you guys have all the fun?”

  The scientists were puffy from the heat, their eyes sunken, but as they staked out further quadrants to keep the search organized, no others passed out. Boris helped for the first hour and then walked away from his team without explanation.

  He remained on the outskirts of the search perimeter, facing away from camp, and held his hand close to his chest. Sometimes his five fingers looked like six. Then he noticed with a turning of his stomach that his right index finger was missing the nail. In the nail’s place had grown a tiny row of baby teeth.

  Every so often Dana checked on the search progress. Everyone besides her and her husband were getting paid a small fortune. She wanted to do more to ensure progress, but it was too damn hot. Mostly she stayed in her tent and told her husband to be careful not to overexert himself. Let the professionals do the heavy lifting. Each time she went out she noticed Boris in the wavering distance.

  Feeling self-conscious, her husband busied himself in an attempt to appear useful. He watched the Eden mite under the microscope, though he couldn’t make heads or tails of it without Boris’s guidance. He charged the battery in his wheelchair with the portable generator. He handed out wet rags to combat the heat. He reviewed the tablet’s ancient symbols.

  One of the more lucid sections of the text referred to the valley where they now resided, between the dead rock in the south and the twin hills in the north. "For the faithful, the garden was there and is there still." Only the text was in primitive Aramaic.

  At dusk, the couple surveyed the day’s work together, Dana on foot and her husband in his wheelchair. The desert valley fluttered with a square mile of marker flags.

  “Maybe the Eden mites only come out at night,” she suggested.

  Her husband nodded, with an apprehensive expression. He watched the far dunes as if something was coming.

  The guides, who usually became more animated near the end of the day, huddled and smoked cigarettes.

  The sand radiated heat like fire pit stones.

  The people waited silently for the other shoe to drop, afraid
that voicing their concerns would make their fears manifest.

  Boris, after rehydrating, wandered back out among the flags. Dana almost told him to be careful but didn’t want to sound paranoid in front of the men. Boris seemed discomposed, his steps more of a shamble than a walk. They all watched him. Maybe Boris just needed some time alone.

  Her insides flipped over from the day’s heat, or from anxiety. She ate some dried Iraqi figs, a food she usually relished. Now the tiny seeds made her cringe. Her husband refused her offer to share, and she begrudgingly ate the rest herself, breaking the dark, almost purple, skin and turning the fruit inside out before biting off small pieces.

  The sun turned blood red, likely from the smoke of an oil refinery burning beyond the horizon. The country was at war. It was a fact easy to forget out in the middle of nowhere.

  Only Boris saw in the sky above the sunset an Aurora Borealis ripple like a suspended red sheet. His right hand was a phantom body-part, even if it wasn’t missing yet. It ached and throbbed and felt like it belonged to someone else. He knew it would be missing soon enough. Everything was red. The sun. The marker flags. The wavering light in the darkening sky. He heard his wife giving birth, despite the fact that she was six hundred miles away.

  Not that he trusted his senses anymore. His brain itched and squirmed like a swollen aphid in his skull.

  The Eden mite. He had thought it was his savior and now knew it was his damnation. Science couldn’t explain its effects, at least not in time to be useful. He was getting worse. He needed to inform his colleagues of his condition. He didn’t want to admit it, but the best course of action was to amputate.

  As the wind picked up, he spread out his arms, closed his eyes to the sand and sun, and listened to the flags flutter.

  “God, help me,” he said in Russian.

  Joey saw Boris standing out there like a scarecrow and started to cry.